… practicing the withdrawal method.

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare [said Rep. Todd Akin, Republican nominee for Senate]. … If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

The raped escape
The rape if it’s a rape!
I think she’s got it…
The raped escape
The rape if it’s a rape!
I think she’s got it…

So if the rape’s legit …
That’s just it!
That’s just it!
You shut the naughty bits!
No shit!
No shit!

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“There are ways of telling if she’s been legitimately raped!“

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[M]y view is that insensitive comments concerning rape are especially likely to be deemed inexcusable by voters, and that the swing against Mr. Akin could be larger than the average of 10 percentage points from similar events.

The New York Times’ Nate Silver gives UD hope that a man this stupid will not defile the United States Senate.

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Strategic Uterine Defense Initiative.

Plus, they make the best potatoes.

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A British historian of science returns to medieval times to help the British understand the mind of one of America’s candidates for the Senate.

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Missouri: The Show Me Your Uterus State.

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Republicans Going After the Ute Vote

She’s only just tamped down the Nevin Shapiro fiasco (thank God for Penn State!), and now here comes the Miller School of Medicine fiasco for University of Miami president Donna Shalala. Rather like big ol’ Larry Summers at Harvard with his interest-rate swaps and Allston expansions, Shalala’s all about thinking big and promising big and, you know, just going for it. Now she’s got a school hemorrhaging money as illustrious researchers like perennial UD favorite Charles Nemeroff receive millions in salary. Nemeroff’s BFF, Pascal J. Goldschmidt, Miller School honcho, must take most of the credit for this outcome.

Greed, ego – at Harvard or UM, you want to try to control these things.

_____________

UD thanks Roy.

[T]he multiplication of bipolar diagnoses [based on mood swings]… [turns] regular variations in human moods into pathology.

… In children, the diagnosis has increased by over 400%.

… Yet doctors often feel safer encouraging patients who report mood swings to go on long-term and even lifelong medication. The same drugs that were once sold to temper the manic episode are now rebranded as prophylactics, necessary not to treat the episode but to stop it happening again.

The Guardian

In a classic tragic reversal, America’s great vampire squid is having some of its own blood drawn. Not very much, to be sure; but if Goldman Sachs has to pay lawyers’ fees for every associate on trial for insider trading, that could put it out of business.

Maybe they’ll send the president of Barnard College – a current Goldman Sachs board member – chasing after Rajat Gupta for repayment.

Ah, law school. Read all about it.

The Great Law and Med School Publication Pumping Machine is a scandal UD should say more about on this blog. The subject usually comes up in relation either to conflict of interest at med schools, where faculty pharmawhores have their articles ghostwritten by the industry, or to guest authorship, where junior professors add the names of senior professors to their articles even though the senior professors did nothing. (These are two reasons why it’s routine for some med school professors to list 800 publications.)

Yeah, well, plenty of people – including this blogger – were appalled when the ninth law school in that state opened last year. Almost immediately, its president resigned because of credit card misuse.

Then there’s Irvine’s new law school, another concentration of overpaid professors and unemployed grads.

But on and on the ABA goes, accrediting everything, making the world safe for tens of thousands of useless lawyers and hundreds of professors who earn $150,000 to $350,000 a year preparing their students to be unemployed.

… from the European Union.

… goes on, with the former Evergreen State University professor skipping out on his big ethics fine from the state of Washington. He stole lots of money from Evergreen State and now seems to have departed the scene, with Washington’s hapless Executive Ethics Board vaguely on his tail.

He’s even been able to sell his condo, so Washington can’t recover that money either.

Yet more sleaze from for-profit schools.

The for-profit Minerva Project has a lot of reputational work to do if it’s going to be regarded as legit, much less Ivy League.

… which was quick. But already the university (and Yale, where Yaron Segal got his PhD) is being featured in news stories about this fatally stupid genius.

… Rush Limbaugh.

Cripes. It’s gotten that bad in the online for-profit racket.

Can they be any more desperate? What’s next? A focus on the education of students?

It’s down to Anne Sinclair and Cambridge University.

They’re the last entities willing to hang out with Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Any university can list; it can drift into a dead calm, an eerie sort of nihilism in which presidents give speeches at campus events, and football teams take the field, yet (quoting Stevie Smith), they’re not waving, but drowning.

The ship of Coppin State is listing, and its faculty have had it. They’ve overwhelmingly voted no confidence in the school’s president.

The second-highest administrative position in the university, the provost, has been filled by four people in the same number of years; the number of cabinet-level staff members has more than doubled under Avery, increasing the university’s debt; three of Coppin’s five schools have not had deans at their helms for several years; the institution [failed] to disburse $800,000 in need-based aide to students in 2011; and [there have been] questionable hiring practices …

The administrative nothingness is the most dire part. It suggests a president intent on autocracy, slowly dismantling the very apparatus of the school so as to assume complete power.